Facebook says it will begin clamping down on the illegal sale of protected areas of the Amazon rainforest on its site.

The social media giant changed its policy following a BBC investigation into the practice.

The new measures will apply only to conservation areas and not to publicly owned forest.

And the move will be limited to the Amazon, not other rainforests and wildlife habitats across the world.

According to a recent study from the think tank Ipam (Instituto de Pesquisa Ambental da Amazonia), a third of all deforestation happens in publicly-owned forests in the Amazon.

Facebook said it would not reveal how it planned to find the illegal ads but said it would “seek to identify and block new listings” in protected areas of the Amazon rainforest.

In February, the BBC Our World documentary Selling the Amazon revealed that plots of rainforest as large as 1,000 football pitches were being listed on Facebook’s classified ads service.

Many of the plots were inside protected areas, including national forests and land reserved for indigenous peoples.

In order to prove the ads were real, the BBC arranged meetings between four sellers and an undercover operative posing as a lawyer claiming to represent wealthy investors.

One land-grabber, Alvim Souza Alves, was trying to sell a plot inside the Uru Eu Wau Wau indigenous reserve for about £16,400 in local currency.

In response to the BBC’s investigation, Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court ordered an inquiry into the sale of protected areas of the Amazon via Facebook.

Despite calls from indigenous leaders to do more, at the time Facebook said it was “ready to work with local authorities”, but would not take independent action to halt the trade.

Now the company says it has consulted the UN Environment Programme (Unep) and other organisations to take its “first steps” in trying to address the issue.

“We will now review listings on Facebook Marketplace against an international organisation’s authoritative database of protected areas to identify listings that may violate this new policy,” the Californian tech firm clarified.

The announcement comes at a time when the social media giant is under increasing pressure from US lawmakers, following a series of bombshell leaks by whistle-blower and former Facebook employee, Frances Haugen.

Facebook also faced criticism this week when a failure brought down the entire platform for five hours worldwide. Instagram and Whatsapp, both owned by Facebook, were also offline during the period.

To try to catch criminal sellers, Facebook is using a database managed by the Unep World Conservation Monitoring Centre.

Unep says it is the most “comprehensive” database of its kind and is updated monthly using reports from “a range of government and other institutions”.

But Brazilian lawyer and scientist Brenda Brito questions the effectiveness of Facebook’s proposals, saying: “If they don’t make it mandatory for sellers to provide the location of the area on sale, any attempt at blocking them will be flawed.

“They may have the best database in the world, but if they don’t have some geo-location reference, it won’t work,” she added.

In its investigation, the BBC found some ads featured satellite images and GPS co-ordinates but not all shared that level of information.

Facebook told the BBC it did not intend to require sellers to post the precise location of advertised land.

“We know there are no ‘silver bullets’ in this topic and we will continue to work to prevent people from circumventing our inspection,” a company spokesperson said.

The Amazon rainforest occupies 7.5 million sq km and spans more than seven countries, including Peru, Ecuador and Colombia.

The tech firm would not confirm whether it was also working with each region’s respective government to strengthen enforcement.

Police in Guatemala have rescued 126 migrants, most Haitians, who were abandoned inside a shipping container at the side of a road.

They were found at dawn between the towns of Nueva Concepción and Cocales after locals reported hearing screams inside the trailer.

Authorities believe they were abandoned by smugglers who had been paid to take them to the US via Mexico.

More than 100 of those discovered are from the crisis-hit nation of Haiti. There were also people from Nepal and Ghana.

Speaking after the discovery, a police spokesperson said: “We heard cries and knocks coming from inside the container. We opened the doors and found 126 undocumented people.”

Officers gave the migrants first aid before escorting them to a shelter run by the Guatemalan Migration Institute.

A spokeswoman for Guatemala’s migration authority, Alejandra Mena, said that the migrants had arrived in Central America in Honduras and from there begun to make the treacherous journey north to the US.

They will now be transported back to the border with Honduras and handed over to authorities.

The discovery comes just a day after Mexican authorities detained 652 migrants, including some 350 children, travelling in three refrigerated double-trailer trucks near the US southern border.

Soldiers at a military checkpoint in Tamaulipas searched the trucks after hearing voices inside.

The incident reflects growing concerns over the amount of migrants, among them large numbers of Haitians, taking significant risks in their attempts to reach the US.

Since the start of 2021, more than 50 migrants have died while trying to cross a jungle corridor called the Darien Gap in Panama, on the border with Colombia, according to the Panamanian prosecutor’s office.

Haiti has suffered from years of instability, culminating in the assassination of President Jouvenal Moïse in July. The following month, the country was hit by a deadly earthquake.

Thousands of Haitians had already left the country, seeking work in countries across Latin America.

Many have begun attempting to reach the US in the belief that they qualify for Temporary Protected Status, a temporary right to remain in the country which has been extended to Haitians already living in the US but not to new arrivals.

Last month about 13,000 Haitians gathered under a bridge connecting Del Rio in Texas to Ciudad Acuña in Mexico. Since then the US has deported more than 7,500 people to Haiti, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM).

The US special envoy for Haiti, Daniel Foote, resigned in protest over the deportations, saying that returning people fleeing an earthquake and political instability was “inhumane”.

But the US Department of Homeland Security’s Marsha Espinosa reiterated that “our borders are not open, and people should not make the dangerous journey”.